Spacefarers

Spacefarers was a skirmish game developed with Andy Murdin. It came about because we had published a little RPG called Mortal Combat, which came to the attention of Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson. It turned out that Games Workshop wanted a big RPG of their own, which they planned to call Adventure, in reserve against the day when they lost the UK licence to publish Dungeons & Dragons.

But Adventure is a story for another post. Nick remembers the Spacefarers background thus:

"I developed most of the basic mechanics, which came from a background of playing S&T games, and which I thought were quite novel at the time. Andy Murdin developed the game from my fairly rough design into quite a nice overall system.

"I do remember it came about because Dave and I visited Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone at their Ravenscourt Park store (they only had the one then) and we were introduced to Bryan Ansell. Bryan ran Citadel miniatures. (I think Ian and Steve had just bought it.) He had this huge wad of typewritten rules for a game involving figures and Steve and Ian had this wacky idea that they'd sell a lot more figures if there was a set of rules to go with them. Bryan had obviously spent a lot of time on his rules, but I looked through them, and just thought we'd start again with a much simpler, slicker system, figuring that kids wanted something simple -- and that was Spacefarers.

"I'd love to say that Warhammer 40K was based on Spacefarers, but actually I think it was based on that big wad of rules that Bryan must have produced in the late Seventies."

To which Bryan Ansell adds:

"The huge wad of typewritten rules was Laserburn, which was influenced by Mike Blake's Old West gunfight rules, by Once Upon a Time in the West (which, by strange chance, I illustrated), Heavy Metal magazine, Tony Yates and Philippe Druillet. Warhammer is its own thing, but was certainly influenced by Laserburn and Rick and Hal's Imperium. It's where Space Marines originated."

(Hal there is, of course, the talented, unique and greatly missed Richard Halliwell.)

The key feature of the rules was that the probability of hitting a target wasn't simply linear with skill, aiming and environmental factors. So if for example your target was running, or you were shooting on the move, or if you were firing through smoke -- each of those factors individually doesn't too badly affect your chance of scoring a hit, but if several factors like those are in play at the same time that would really have a big impact. This made for a lot more judicious gameplay than you'd see in most squad-level tactical games of the time.

But why are we telling you this? You can download the game and try it out for yourself!